Glubble raises $1 M for Family Timeline service

Dean TakahashiJune 25, 2009 9:00 AM

Glubble has raised $1 million in a second round of funding and launched a new photo gallery timeline for its family-friendly web browser.

The new round of funding will help the company launch what it calls its Family Timeline service, which lets families upload photos that are organized along a chronological timeline. You can share the photos and quickly navigate through them to find the ones you want. The service is part of the Glubble for Families browser, which is an extension to the Firefox browser. The company released its first kids browser in 2007 and a second version for families in 2008.

Much like thisMoment, which launched on Tuesday, this new service tries to take the “shoebox” experience of storing photos online and organizing them so you can do much more with them. If you really want to live a documented life, there are more and more ways to do it. Rseven.com, for instance, will let you record all of your mobile phone activities and view them chronologically.

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Alexander van Elsas, Glubble’s the new chief executive, says the easy-to-use interface will make the service stand out among competitors. He was previously the company’s chief operating officer and replaces Willem-Jan Schutte, a founder who will remain a board member.

I got a demo of the Family Timeline service. It looks well-organized and has an interesting search function. You can, for instance, look up the birth date of your child and see all of the kid’s birthday photos from past years. If you have photos that have no date, you can store them in a virtual “shoebox” to organize later.

The San Francisco company will let families use the Family Timeline service for free as part of its Glubble browser. A premium paid membership of $39.95 a year will let families have unlimited photo uploading, storage and sharing. Families can use Glubble (which has restrictions to allow for private family-friend web browsing) to set up a private family home page where they can leave messages on a wall, create photo albums, and set up a family schedule.

So far, Glubble for Families has been downloaded 800,000 times, and users have added 300,000 safe web sites to the web browser. Van Elsas said he expects to integrate Twitter and Facebook functions soon and to enable photo sharing with Facebook and Flickr.

Glubble previously raised $3 million from angels in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands. The new round came from the same unnamed investors.

The company was founded in 2006 and currently has six employees. That’s a lot less than the 30 employees it said it had last fall. But van Elsas says that Glubble has always been small and that it spun out of a larger company, Glaxstar, which had more employees.